Addiction: A Disease, Or Not?

Is Alcoholism A Disease? Is Addiction A Disease?

I was looking at an Addiction Help site the other day. People were chiming in on whether they thought Alcoholism was a disease. I wrote about this once, because I felt I needed to. Can’t remember where it is, on the site, so I’ll jot this down real quick.

First: The case of Alcoholism, or Drug Addiction being a disease is only relevant if you’re going to profit from the business of disease. If you’re somehow tied in with the Medical Industry you can get money for treating a disease. For Alcoholics and Drug Addicts, it’s a pointless question: It doesn’t matter.

If you drink like, you think, an alcoholic might drink and you want to quit, it doesn’t matter whether somebody say’s it’s a disease or not. Also it’s useful to look at where and how we start saying things and the words we use to say them.

What has taken place is we’ve got all these diseases listed and entered into the modern day language for profit. If you make money from disease – it’s good to have a lot of diseases. Notice the wording in the first and second definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary ( below ). With this criteria almost everything is a disease.

Notice also, what was most likely the original meaning of the word (dis-ease) is listed as obsolete. The question I always have is – why are we asking the question at all?

If you ever bother to read comments on this question (is alcoholism a disease) you’ll notice a common trend. It goes something like this:

• Yes, it’s a disease, taken from the definitions below. This is not debatable – Medically accepted. Hey, the people that decide what is officially a disease have decided and it’s a done deal. That’s the current monetary party line position.
• Then comes, it’s not a disease, it’s a lack of character. A mental weakness. Alcoholics and addicts are just pussies.
• Followed by, addiction is the result of a – sin, evil, spiritual malady, god thing. Remedied by accepting a certain religious treatment. These people will write a prescription for your condition – in the comments section.

The problem with all these opinions, and that’s all they are, is they don’t help alcoholics and addicts. I have a solution to the whole labeling dilemma: Stop debating. If you don’t have a problem with drugs and alcohol stop writing about it. You can only know about it by experiencing it first hand.

Alcoholics Anonymous got a lot of stuff right. Mainly because Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob were smart guys and they had some good help. One of the really good things they wrote down in the Big Book is that alcoholism can be likened to an allergy. Is it an allergy? Doesn’t matter. If we treat it like an allergy we’re on the right track. If you have an allergy you accept that you either – stay away from what you’re allergic to – or go through the allergic reaction.

Are there good reasons for categorizing alcoholism as an allergy? Yes, it behaves like an allergy. How about drug addiction? Is addiction an allergy? I don’t know. I do know that people react differently when taking drugs. I thought about all this and came up with – treat it all as an allergy. I dealt with an addiction to heroin like I was allergic to heroin.

Another thing to keep in mind – An addiction can be dealt with in a couple of weeks. After that we don’t deal with addiction, we deal with our behavior. Behavior is not an addiction related problem. We may have developed some behaviors because of the drugs we took but we can’t solve them by staying off drugs.

This why the twelve steps were written out. They are an introduction to a set of principles. This twelve step process is the program of alcoholics anonymous. The twelve steps deal with behavior. Only in step one is alcohol even mentioned.

Disease: Definitions

American Heritage Dictionary

1. noun A pathological condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms.
2. noun A condition or tendency, as of society, regarded as abnormal and harmful.
3. noun Obsolete Lack of ease; trouble.

Century Dictionary

1. noun Lack or absence of ease; uneasiness; pain; distress; trouble; discomfort.
2. noun In pathology: In general, a morbid, painful or otherwise distressing physical condition, acute or chronic, which may result either in death or in a more or loss complete return to health; deviation from the healthy or normal condition of any of the functions or tissues of the body.
3. noun Specifically— An individual case of such a morbid condition; the complex series of pathological conditions causally related to one another exhibited by one person during one period of illness; an attack of sickness.

GNU Webster’s 1913

1. verb-transitive To deprive of ease; to disquiet; to trouble; to distress.
2. verb-transitive To derange the vital functions of; to afflict with disease or sickness; to disorder; — used almost exclusively in the participle diseased.
3. noun Lack of ease; uneasiness; trouble; vexation; disquiet.

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